"Degrade" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... baptism,' and the other says 'at the moment of faith.' I am not going to be tempted into controversial paths now, for my purpose is a very different one, but I cannot help just a word about the former of these two answers. 'Given in baptism,' say our friends, and I venture to think that they thereby degrade Christianity into a system of magic, bringing together two entirely disparate things, an external physical act and a spiritual change. I do not say anything about the disastrous effects that have followed from such a conception of the medium by which ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture: Romans Corinthians (To II Corinthians, Chap. V) • Alexander Maclaren
... South America. The letter also foreshadows the decisive conflict which is here to be waged between the elements of freedom and slavery, between social and political systems that will rescue and exalt humanity, and those which depress and degrade it. In the phraseology of that age, it was to be determined whether—the Old World, in the language of Twiss, "being almost at an end"—a "light" should be "set up" here to usher in the "kingdom of Christ," ...
— Salem Witchcraft, Volumes I and II • Charles Upham
... comes to. I love my vices more than I love the Master whose name I profess. Either openly or secretly, I will give rein to my appetites and passions"—he should be arrested by the consideration that he proposes to do that which will wound the feelings, and degrade the position, and injure the influence, of thousands of the best men and women in the world; that he proposes to inflict an irreparable injury upon a cause which has never injured him, and whose office it is to save him, and all mankind. ...
— Lessons in Life - A Series of Familiar Essays • Timothy Titcomb
... has failed, certainly seems objectionable, but I believe it must certainly be legal, just as preferring a second indictment would. I am myself, however, most inclined to support this course, not because I approve it, but because after all that has happened, it would degrade both Wellesley and Plunket, and exalt the Orange faction in the public eye, to refuse our sanction to the measures ...
— Memoirs of the Court of George IV. 1820-1830 (Vol 1) - From the Original Family Documents • Duke of Buckingham and Chandos
... parallel to each other like the two wheels of a gig, left their marks on every road he travelled in the north of England, to the great delight of the major part of his profession, who sickened at his superiority, and exulted in every thing that threatened to injure his reputation and degrade him in the eyes of the public. Nor did their malice want subjects to work upon: The Statiras and the Roxanas by turns got possession of our young Alexander, and the demon of licentiousness seems ...
— The Mirror of Taste, and Dramatic Censor, Vol. I, No. 6, June 1810 • Various
... of those ideas which degrade mankind, naive as a child, he lived like a sea-bird, a gull, or a flower, prodigal of the treasures of poetic imagination, and possessed of a divine knowledge, the fruitful extent of which he contemplated in solitude. Incredible mingling of two creations! sometimes ...
— The Hated Son • Honore de Balzac
... iii. 6); and it is just because He is this, that His counsels, which He declared without any condition attached to them, must be [Pg 447] unchangeable. To believe that He has for ever rejected Israel, is to degrade Him, to make Him an idol, a creature.—In ver. 36, the immutability of God's counsel of grace is put on a level with the immutability of God's order of nature; but this is done with a view to the weakness of the people, who receive, ...
— Christology of the Old Testament: And a Commentary on the Messianic Predictions. Vol. 2 • Ernst Hengstenberg
... condescending to answer her, went on sketching a theory in harmony with my young and simple intelligence. This was the first real pleasure I enjoyed in my life. Had it not been for M. Baffo, this circumstance might have been enough to degrade my understanding; the weakness of credulity would have become part of my mind. The ignorance of the two others would certainly have blunted in me the edge of a faculty which, perhaps, has not carried me very far in my after life, but to which ...
— The Memoires of Casanova, Complete • Jacques Casanova de Seingalt
... provoked the House of Commons to take some measures to prevent their growing power, which that pious monarch was too much disposed to favour. In consequence of this, the leading members of the opposition petitioned the King to remove the bishops from their seats in Parliament, and degrade them to the station at Commons, which was warmly opposed by the high church lords, and the bishops themselves, who protested against whatever steps were taken during their restraint from Parliament, as illegal, upon this principle, that as they were part of the legislature, no law could ...
— The Lives of the Poets of Great Britain and Ireland (1753) - Volume I. • Theophilus Cibber
... means of promoting the one aim which held them together—the undermining of Clarendon's power. For this object they were all alike prepared to support the pretensions, and flatter the vanity, of the shameless and grasping courtesan, to ruin the happiness of the wife, to degrade the honour, and send to slumber the scruples, of the King, and to besmirch that Crown, which a flood of unselfish loyalty had restored, only two years before, to the love and reverence ...
— The Life of Edward Earl of Clarendon V2 • Henry Craik
... be reckoned by hundreds. Babies, torn from the breast were tossed from pike to pike along the Jacobin ranks. One champion of liberty had his pockets well stuffed with ears. Another swaggered about with the finger of a little child in his hat. A few months had sufficed to degrade France below the level ...
— Critical and Historical Essays, Volume III (of 3) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... to degrade the abolitionists in the opinion of the house, by showing the wildness and absurdity of their schemes. It was again insisted upon that emancipation was the real object of the former; so that thousands of slaves would be let loose ...
— The History of the Rise, Progress and Accomplishment of the Abolition of the African Slave Trade by the British Parliament (1808) • Thomas Clarkson
... exclaimed Zenobia, rather contemptuously. "She is the type of womanhood, such as man has spent centuries in making it. He is never content unless he can degrade himself by stooping towards what he loves. In denying us our rights, he betrays even more blindness to his own interests than profligate disregard ...
— The Blithedale Romance • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... to natural causes the blessings, of which I have enjoyed many. I think I should go mad if in my soliloquies I came across any misfortune which I could not trace to my own fault, for I should not know where to place the reason, and that would degrade me to the rank of creatures governed by instinct alone. I feel that I am somewhat more than a beast. A beast, in truth, is a foolish neighbour of mine, who tries to argue that the brutes reason ...
— The Memoires of Casanova, Complete • Jacques Casanova de Seingalt
... sits for a nomination borough owes his seat to a man of virtue and honour, to a man whose service is perfect freedom, to a man who would think himself degraded by any proof of gratitude which might degrade his nominee. Yet is it nothing that such a member comes into this House wearing the badge, though not feeling the chain of servitude? Is it nothing that he cannot speak of his independence without exciting a ...
— The Miscellaneous Writings and Speeches of Lord Macaulay, Vol. 4 (of 4) - Lord Macaulay's Speeches • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... may be atoned for and forgiven; but insults admit of no compensation. They degrade the mind in its own esteem, and force it to recover its level ...
— Frank Mildmay • Captain Frederick Marryat
... take the first night she came; she began to look up to this young man—so much younger than herself—without knowing what it meant; it was not until she found that this attitude did not detract from his picturesqueness that she discovered herself seeking for reasons to degrade ...
— Frontier Stories • Bret Harte
... of courtiers and the ladies, if I can so describe them of the royal household, but for obvious reasons I will not describe the style of their dancing. It was barbarism run mad, and our chief feeling was disgust that human beings should so degrade themselves. ...
— The Two Supercargoes - Adventures in Savage Africa • W.H.G. Kingston
... circle of my friends, and of acquiring a competent knowledge of the conventional rules of society. Though naturally fond of company, I hated dissipation, and those low vices which many young men designate as pleasure, in the pursuit of which they too often degrade their mental and physical powers. Mr. Moncton laughed at what he termed my affectation of moral integrity, and tried by every art to seduce me to join in amusements, and visit scenes, from which my ...
— The Monctons: A Novel, Volume I • Susanna Moodie
... with more passion, (forgive me, I mean not to offend you,) than perhaps you will approve in yourself when I am far removed from Italy. For have you not a noble mind? And are you not a son of the Marquis della Porretta? Permit me to observe, that passion will make a man exalt himself, and degrade another; and the just medium will be then forgot. I am afraid I have been thought more lightly of, than I ought to be, either in justice, or for the honour of a person who is dear to every one present. My country was once mentioned with disdain: ...
— The History of Sir Charles Grandison, Volume 4 (of 7) • Samuel Richardson
... the teacher, constantly 235:15 imparted to pupils, will reach higher than the heavens of astronomy; while the debased and unscrupulous mind, though adorned with gems of scholarly attainment, will 235:18 degrade the characters it should ...
— Science and Health With Key to the Scriptures • Mary Baker Eddy
... not Joshua could constrain them to the pillow after the lark had sung reveille. A woman will sit pitilessly at the breakfast table however the male eye may shift and quail. It is the business and the art of life to degrade permanencies. Fluidity is existence, there is no other, and for ever the chief attraction of Paradise must be that there is a serpent in it to keep it lively and wholesome. Lacking the serpent we are no longer in Paradise, we are at home, and our sole entertainment is to ...
— Here are Ladies • James Stephens
... man is acting but in his own justification. I will wait for mine. To resist would be to degrade us with a bully's brawl; they have the law with them. Let it ...
— Under Two Flags • Ouida [Louise de la Ramee]
... more rounded forms, and from the general obscurity, the palms, a tree made for moonlight, stand out in soft distinctness. At such a time we forget the foul crimes which disfigure the past, and the vices which degrade the present of this fair land, and can easily imagine ourselves in the garden where the yet unfallen progenitors of mankind walked under a firmament 'glowing with living sapphires,' and together hymned the praises of their Creator. Daylight chases away this illusion, ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. IV. October, 1863, No. IV. - Devoted to Literature and National Policy. • Various
... exclaimed, shaking his fist. "To express publicly the opinion that a nobleman could so far degrade himself as to become a secret assassin! I will know who my insolent calumniators are, and I will then see if justice has power at Antwerp to protect an innocent stranger against the ...
— The Amulet • Hendrik Conscience
... I honestly felt. To have condoled with the Minister on the loss that he had sustained by the death of a woman, self-betrayed to me as shamelessly deceitful, and pitilessly determined to reach her own cruel ends, would have been to degrade myself by telling a deliberate lie. I expressed in my answer all that an honest man naturally feels, when he is writing to a friend in distress; carefully abstaining from any allusion to the memory of his wife, or to the place which her death had left vacant ...
— The Legacy of Cain • Wilkie Collins
... utterly degrade myself. I could neither lower my standard, nor sacrifice my ideal," said Leo, with a touch of scorn in her ...
— At the Mercy of Tiberius • August Evans Wilson
... and weaken the moral sense and the will, more intensely than the strictest follower of the Arabian Prophet abhors the draughts which deprive man of the full use of the senses, intelligence, and conscience which Allah has bestowed, and degrade him below the brute, Esmo's children, moreover, were not more strictly compelled to respect the letter than carefully instructed in the principle of every command for which he ...
— Across the Zodiac • Percy Greg
... men slowly coming northward, as the rigors of the last glacial period abated, domicile here, and build this huge gaunt temple before they passed farther north, to degrade and dwindle down into Eskimos wandering the dismal coasts of ...
— The Story of Extinct Civilizations of the West • Robert E. Anderson
... slumbering at your posts?—Are there no Shiphrahs, no Puahs among you, who will dare in Christian firmness and Christian meekness, to refuse to obey the wicked laws which require woman to enslave, to degrade and to brutalize woman? Are there no Miriams, who would rejoice to lead out the captive daughters of the Southern States to liberty and light? Are there no Huldahs there who will dare to speak the truth concerning the sins of the people and those judgments, which it ...
— The Anti-Slavery Examiner, Omnibus • American Anti-Slavery Society
... the holy cement of a moral purpose; only as there is stitched into the cloth the diviner thread of hopeful love; only as the deed gathers the aroma of an aspiring human life, is it a dignified transaction. But when you make of the laborer a slave, degrade his work to a mere fight for bread, harass him by continual debt, put him in a vile tenement house that smothers all holy ambition, labor has no longer dignity, it smells rather of ...
— White Slaves • Louis A Banks
... said Charlton, lifting up his pale face, twitching with nervousness, "I don't want to get free by playing tricks on a court of law. I know that fifteen or twenty years in prison would not leave me much worth living for, but I will not degrade myself by evading justice with delays and false affidavits. If you can do anything for me fairly and squarely, I should like to ...
— The Mystery of Metropolisville • Edward Eggleston
... existence of a spiritual or corporal being who would do mischief without a material motive, simply for the sake of mischief and the pleasure he found in the despair of a fellow-being: you did not believe that there are men who will afflict the innocent with pain and sorrow, who will degrade, socially and morally humiliate you, and then laugh you in the face and make game of you. Stay here, move in our society, and you will find out your mistake! Why, what a sight it will be to have the great debater, the candidate-elect, the sage and learned doctor, and heir of old Diogenes caught ...
— Dr. Dumany's Wife • Mr Jkai
... receive Octavius. He spoke her fairly, but she was wise enough to see that all her charms were lost on him, and that he proposed to degrade her by making her walk as a ...
— Historic Tales, Volume 11 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality • Charles Morris
... study and practice of medicine degrading women, he asked if it degraded men. No; it elevated them. They could not contradict him on that point. He declined to believe, without a particle of evidence, that any science could elevate the higher sex and degrade the lower. What evidence we had ran against it. Nurses are not, as a class, unfeminine, yet all that is most appalling, disgusting, horrible, and unsexing in the art of healing is monopolized ...
— The Woman-Hater • Charles Reade
... danger and necessity 'yearns after the gods,' and has present in his heart the idea of a father and friend. This is the religious element. The same man, when he comes to indulge his fancy for fiction, will degrade this spiritual friend and father to the level of the beasts, and will make him the hero of comic or repulsive adventures. This is the mythical or irrational element. Religion, in its moral aspect, always traces back to ...
— Myth, Ritual, and Religion, Vol. 1 • Andrew Lang
... the husband or guardian, presupposes or foreshows a subversion more or less of the most essential relations of family life. The necessity of resorting to this means of gaining or maintaining power must degrade the clergy who depend on it, by tempting them to arts of flattery and excitement, and by corrupting their style of instruction to suit the tastes merely of the more sensitive section of our species, at the sacrifice of that ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 58, Number 358, August 1845 • Various
... then begged that before Herrick condemned the bears to starve on acorns, he should give them a farewell drink, and Herrick, who was slightly rattled, replied excitedly that he had not ransomed the animals only to degrade them. The argument was interrupted by the French chef falling out of a tree. He had climbed it, he explained, in order to obtain ...
— The Nature Faker • Richard Harding Davis
... bound volumes at so much per volume. And it is an authentic fact, that a bookseller to the Czar of Russia one Klostermann, actually sold books at fifty to one hundred roubles by the yard, according to the binding. The force of folly could no farther go, to debase the aims and degrade the intellect ...
— A Book for All Readers • Ainsworth Rand Spofford
... he, "be always mistress of this house, of me, and mine. The chosen wife of my heart will never torment you, or degrade herself, with paltry struggles for power. Your days shall be happy and honoured: believe me, I speak ...
— Tales and Novels, Vol. V - Tales of a Fashionable Life • Maria Edgeworth
... skipper said, but I tell you at once I'm not going to stoop to do anything of the kind. Do you think I'm going to degrade myself by ...
— Hunting the Skipper - The Cruise of the "Seafowl" Sloop • George Manville Fenn
... at this. You thought I was blind because I shut my eyes. Now I have had enough of it. We do not die through the treacheries of a woman of your sort. When they become too monstrous we get out of the way. To inflict punishment on account of them would be only to degrade oneself." ...
— Sentimental Education, Volume II - The History of a Young Man • Gustave Flaubert
... the kindlier sentiments here seem playing out in a sort of jubilee. Untied from set purposes and definite aims, the persons come forth with their hearts already tuned, and so have but to let off their redundant music. Envy, jealousy, avarice, revenge, all the passions that afflict and degrade society, they have left in the city behind them. And they have brought the intelligence and refinement of the Court without its vanities and vexations; so that the graces of art and the simplicities of ...
— Shakespeare: His Life, Art, And Characters, Volume I. • H. N. Hudson
... Dean's "Frequent reproaching the [132] Animadverter with the Character of a Wit, tho join'd with such ill-favour'd Epithets, as his witless Malice has thought fit to degrade it with, as that he is a spiteful Wit, a wrangling Wit, a satirical Wit, and the WITTY, subtle, good-natur'd Animadverter, &c. the Dr. says, that tho there be but little Wit shewn in making such Charges; yet if Wit be a Reproach ...
— A Discourse Concerning Ridicule and Irony in Writing (1729) • Anthony Collins
... for a man to use alcoholic drinks regularly without laying the foundation for both physical and mental diseases, and, at the same time, lessening his power to make the best of himself in his life-work; while beyond this lies the awful risk of acquiring an appetite which may enslave, degrade and ruin him, body and soul, as it is degrading and ruining its tens of ...
— Grappling with the Monster • T. S. Arthur
... many barbarisms that could not but shock a polite auditory; whereas, Mr. Home, the modern author, knew how to be refined in the very midst of grief and passion; to represent death, not merely as awful, but graceful and pathetic; and never condescended to degrade the majesty of the Tragic Muse by the ludicrous apposition of buffoonery and familiar punning, such as the elder playwright certainly had resort to. Besides, Mr. Home's performance had been admired in quarters so high, and by personages whose taste ...
— The Virginians • William Makepeace Thackeray
... cried Mrs. Selwyn, "would you wish to degrade the habitation of your friend, by admitting into it the insipid company ...
— Evelina • Fanny Burney
... and, in the second, there was a choice of engaging or not in those practices, the known consequences of which were servitude. The involuntary; on the other hand, will comprehend those, who were forced, without any such condition or choice, into a situation, which as it tended to degrade a part of the human species, and to class it with the brutal, must have been, of all human situations, the most wretched and insupportable. These are they, whom we shall consider solely in the present work. We shall therefore take our leave of the former, as they ...
— An Essay on the Slavery and Commerce of the Human Species, Particularly the African • Thomas Clarkson
... knowing him again by sight or smell. Several of these ill-looking men returned intoxicated, to my great disgust; for I had a peculiar objection to persons in that condition, and never trusted a man who could degrade himself below my own level. I watched them all, every moment expecting the one who had tried to curry favour with me, for I had an instinctive assurance that I had not seen the last of him. Night drew on while I ...
— Cat and Dog - Memoirs of Puss and the Captain • Julia Charlotte Maitland
... before her husband. "Take the key of the money-box back,—but do you know what will happen? I am ashamed, but you will compel me to go on to the stage to get the merest necessaries of life. Is this what you want? Degrade your wife, or bring in conflict two ...
— Analytical Studies • Honore de Balzac
... mankind by monopolizing all virtues for the Christian name. It is only by his holy thoughts that Jesus serves us. "To aim to convert a man by miracles is a profanation of the soul." The preachers do a wrong to Jesus by removing him from our human sympathies; they should not degrade his life and ...
— Ralph Waldo Emerson • Oliver Wendell Holmes
... while it has no place in economic theory, is that which most ennobles and beautifies human character. And here let me register my last attack upon Socialistic controversy, which is, that fundamentally it tends to degrade human character by adopting for, and applying to the manual workers of the world a contemptuous epithet. When Marx, if it was he, I am not sure, shouted: "Proletariat of all nations, unite" he said a very ...
— The Inhumanity of Socialism • Edward F. Adams
... the controlling force in this country shall be a moral force?—that it shall conspire with the great idea of Liberty, and not degrade and destroy it? The theory of our institutions is our pride. But it is a pitiful truth that our public life has become synonymous with knavery. If a politician is introduced, you feel of your pockets. It is shameful that it is universally conceded that the best men, the ...
— The American Union Speaker • John D. Philbrick
... what you mean, sir. Mr. Monson, that would be degrading lawful wedlock to the level of a bet—a game of cards—a mercenary, contemptible bargain. No, sir—nothing shall ever induce me to degrade this honorable estate to such ...
— Autobiography of a Pocket-Hankerchief • James Fenimore Cooper
... importance, their insufferable arrogance, which makes them think that kings or princes are not too good for her—these have all had no light share; and if I live for six months I will bring that pride down to the very lowest pitch. I will degrade her till she thinks herself ...
— The King's Highway • G. P. R. James
... jurisdiction doth no more agree to the king than the power of ecclesiastical order: his power is civil and temporal, not spiritual and ecclesiastical. Dr Field also confesseth,(1129) that none may judicially degrade, or put any one, lawfully admitted, from his degree and order, but the spiritual guides of ...
— The Works of Mr. George Gillespie (Vol. 1 of 2) • George Gillespie
... already. Do you wish me to go further, to remove you from your Presbytery, or perhaps report your conduct to those who have power to take the frock off your back? What standard of sanctity for the sacrament of Holy Matrimony do you expect to maintain while you degrade it by openly associating with a woman who has broken her marriage vows and become little better . . . I grieve to say it [with a deep inclination of the head towards the poor wreck in the elbow-chair] little better than a common. ...
— The Woman Thou Gavest Me - Being the Story of Mary O'Neill • Hall Caine
... secure improved dwellings, open spaces, cheap baths, and better municipal sanitation for the poor. But improvement in these matters cannot come entirely from without; "the model tenement implies a model tenant." As a London authority puts it: "The condition of the house may degrade its occupants. The careless life and habits of the occupants will spoil the house, and make it filthy and unhealthy." The friendly visitor should try to make the family healthily discontented with unsanitary surroundings, ...
— Friendly Visiting among the Poor - A Handbook for Charity Workers • Mary Ellen Richmond
... nineteenth century has sought to degrade Love; to define it as purely physical. The result has been a corresponding degradation of art, and even literature has lost much of its lofty idealism. Nudity has become a synonym of vulgarity; Love, of lust. "Evil be to him who evil thinks." True Love never seeks to degrade its object; ...
— The People's Common Sense Medical Adviser in Plain English • R. V. Pierce
... against reason, we must basely degrade our understanding, not to see the folly of what is called monarchy. Nature is orderly in all her works; but this is a mode of government that counteracts nature. It turns the progress of the human faculties upside down. It subjects age to be governed ...
— The Writings Of Thomas Paine, Complete - With Index to Volumes I - IV • Thomas Paine
... by the thought that ten years, twenty years, forty years would pass, and that even in forty years I would remember with loathing and humiliation those filthiest, most ludicrous, and most awful moments of my life. No one could have gone out of his way to degrade himself more shamelessly, and I fully realised it, fully, and yet I went on pacing up and down from the table to the stove. "Oh, if you only knew what thoughts and feelings I am capable of, how cultured I am!" I thought at moments, mentally addressing the sofa ...
— Notes from the Underground • Feodor Dostoevsky
... governed by chance, without a wise overruling Providence: for they all formerly believed that there was a state of rewards and punishments to the good and bad after this life; and they now look on those that think otherwise as scarce fit to be counted men, since they degrade so noble a being as the soul, and reckon it no better than a beast's: thus they are far from looking on such men as fit for human society, or to be citizens of a well-ordered commonwealth; since a man of such ...
— Ideal Commonwealths • Various
... of them, That many of us think scorn of honest trade, And take no pride in our own shops; who care Only to quit a calling, will not make The calling what it might be; who despise Their work, Fate laughs at, and doth let the work Dull, and degrade them." ...
— Poems by Jean Ingelow, In Two Volumes, Volume I. • Jean Ingelow
... to degrade himself by coarse toil—and hitherto, he had been too proud to work. The thought was terrible. Pegasus hitched to the plough was nothing compared with the prospect of Mr. Perkins being obliged to earn three or four dollars a week in some humble, ...
— At the Sign of the Jack O'Lantern • Myrtle Reed
... comprehension belonging to the Central Intelligence, how remote the creative conception is from all scholastic and ethical formulae, I am led to think that a healthy mind ought to change its mood from time to time, and come down from its noblest condition,—never, of course, to degrade itself by dwelling upon what is itself debasing, but to let its lower faculties have a chance to air and exercise themselves. After the first and second floor have been out in the bright street dressed in all their splendors, shall not our humble friends in the basement have their holiday, ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... resolve that those who will not obey his laws shall be for ever excluded from heaven? He loves his virtuous and obedient children, and will make them perfectly happy. He never will permit the wicked to mar their joys and degrade their home. If God were an unkind being, he would let the wicked go to heaven. He would have no prison to detain them. He would leave the good unprotected and exposed to abase from the bad. But God is love. He never thus will abandon his children. He has provided a strong ...
— The Child at Home - The Principles of Filial Duty, Familiarly Illustrated • John S.C. Abbott
... complexity. Who can divine the many motives which must have combined with intellectual causes at successive moments of his life, to change the Christian student, into the apostate, to convert disbelief into hatred, and to degrade the philosopher into the persecutor? History happily offers so few parallels to enable us to form a conjecture on the answer, that we may be content to ...
— History of Free Thought in Reference to The Christian Religion • Adam Storey Farrar
... carried further with results that would be advantageous as well as curious. We degrade and finally vitiate our conscience if we do not respect its behests. Conscience then itself becomes small and timid and humble, shamefaced, and at length a mere whisper. Absolutely silent it can never ...
— The Cult of Incompetence • Emile Faguet
... up over her anchors like a piece of architecture, poising like a tower; the sailor in him paid tribute to the builders who had conceived her beauty. They had devised a ship: it needed Mr. Fant and his colleagues to degrade her into a sea-going prophet and give aptness to her by-name of "Hell-packet." He was clear of her now; he might fail to reach the shore and drown, but at least the grey woman aft would never see his humiliation and defeat. He turned over, setting his face ...
— Those Who Smiled - And Eleven Other Stories • Perceval Gibbon
... Dunciad. And its incorporation is by no means equivalent to the pollution of epic. That, Harte hints, is the achievement of scribblers like Blackmore (p. 12). It is they who inadvertently write mock-epics, parodies which degrade their great models; Pope, nominally writing ...
— An Essay on Satire, Particularly on the Dunciad • Walter Harte
... insignificant existence. Public taste inclined to the gross and the sensual, and welcomed as enjoyable, what the present discards as disgusting. Ladies of the highest rank sat through plays of which the purpose and effect was to degrade their own womanhood, to remove from the minds of the men who sat about and watched their countenances at each new obscenity, whatever respect for the sex might have lingered there. Some wore masks to hide the blushes which might have been looked for ...
— A History of English Prose Fiction • Bayard Tuckerman
... Does the fact look crass[698] and material, threatening to degrade thy theory of spirit? Resist it not; it goes to refine and raise thy theory of matter just ...
— Essays • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... subdivisions called obes—according to which the more aristocratic offices appear to have been elected. There were also recognised in the Spartan constitution two distinct classes—the Equals and the Inferiors. Though these were hereditary divisions, merit might promote a member of the last—demerit degrade a member of the first. The Inferiors, though not boasting the nobility of the Equals, often possessed men equally honoured and powerful: as among the commoners of England are sometimes found persons of higher birth ...
— Athens: Its Rise and Fall, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... little of its poetical physiognomy on a near approach. Modern restoration has done something to spoil the outside, and modern refinement a good deal to degrade the interior with pews and partitions; but it is a very fine building, and worthy of its metropolitan dignity. I am told that the very church built by Magnus the Good,—son of Saint Olave—over his father's remains, and finished by his ...
— Letters From High Latitudes • The Marquess of Dufferin (Lord Dufferin)
... in the judgment of Ulster, would degrade the status of Ulster citizenship by impairing its relationship to Imperial Parliament. This would be effected both by lessening or extinguishing the representation of Ulster in that Parliament, and by removing the control ...
— Against Home Rule (1912) - The Case for the Union • Various
... easy mind seduce! For rich ill poets are without excuse. "Tis very dang'rous, tamp'ring with a Muse; The profit's small, and you have much to lose: For tho' true wit adorns your birth, or place, Degenerate lines degrade th' attainted race." ...
— The Art Of Poetry An Epistle To The Pisos - Q. Horatii Flacci Epistola Ad Pisones, De Arte Poetica. • Horace
... the unjust, who is not intentionally in error. Is not the noble that which subjects the beast to the man, or rather to the God in man; the ignoble, that which subjects the man to the beast? And if so, who would receive gold on condition that he was to degrade the noblest part of himself under the worst?—who would sell his son or daughter into the hands of brutal and evil men, for any amount of money? And will he sell his own fairer and diviner part without any compunction to the most godless and ...
— The Republic • Plato
... after Douglas of the fourth district, branded him as a fakir, an idiot, a senseless dreamer, an egotist, a demagogue, a party traitor, a knocker, and every other objectionable kind of disturber of the peace, meaning by "peace," the peace of those who are let alone by reformers to rob the state, degrade politics, enthrone injustice, keep the party in power ...
— The High Calling • Charles M. Sheldon
... in this miserable country appears in nothing so much as in dooming the female, the widow, to be burnt alive with the putrid carcase of her husband. The Hindoo legislators have sanctioned this immolation, showing herein a studied determination to insult and degrade woman. She is, therefore, in the first instance, deluded into this act by the writings of these bramhuns {u-caron}; in which also she is promised, that if she will offer herself, for the benefit of her husband, on the funeral pile, ...
— The Life of William Carey • George Smith
... have had, would be very much superior to them. And one's indignation increases against those who, North as well as South, taunt the colored race with inferiority while they themselves use every means in their power to crush and degrade them, denying them every right and privilege, closing against them every avenue of elevation and improvement. Were they, under such circumstances, intellectual and refined, they would certainly be vastly superior to any other race ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 13, No. 79, May, 1864 • Various
... deceives all right, but doesn't hurt. It's the world of art and artists, Tom Dorgan, where people paint their lies, or write them, or act them; where they lift money all right from men's pockets, but lift their souls and their lives, too, away from the things that trouble and bore and—and degrade. ...
— In the Bishop's Carriage • Miriam Michelson
... she delivered herself. '"You speak," she then said, "as I would have you speak, but not at all as you have decided to speak. You cannot at one and the same moment be Francesco of Upcote and Francesco Ignoto; you cannot exalt yourself and degrade yourself. If you choose to be a gentleman, why did ...
— The Fool Errant • Maurice Hewlett
... upon the coast of Schleswig-Holstein and Jutland, and were there no conflicting influences, the shore would rapidly extend itself westwards. But the same waves which wash the sand to the coast undermine the beach they cover, and still more rapidly degrade the shore at points where it is too high to receive partial protection by the formation of dunes upon it. The earth of the coast is generally composed of particles finer, lighter, and more transportable by water than the ...
— The Earth as Modified by Human Action • George P. Marsh
... bringing the precepts of art within the pale of our accepted literature, Sir Joshua Reynolds has given to art a better position. Would that there were no counteracting circumstances which still keep it from reaching its proper rank! Some there are, which materially degrade it, amongst which is the attempt to force patronage; the whole system of Art Unions, and of Schools of Design, the "in forma pauperis" petitioning and advertising, and the rearing innumerable artists, ill-educated in all but drawing, and mere ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Vol. 53, No. 331, May, 1843 • Various
... lines running each way, said to have been made by foreigners, asked me to explain what it was. He also showed me a musical-box and a spy-glass, asking many questions. From all I could learn by my visit to this pretender there was nothing in their religion to elevate, but everything to degrade. With them to rob and murder were virtuous deeds. "Slay the imps" was their watchword. Gordon found in this fanatic a foe of no mean order. But he soon found too that courage and faith in God had done and would still lead to victory. In a letter home ...
— General Gordon - Saint and Soldier • J. Wardle
... excitedly to protest against the last speaker's proposals, which he declared were an insult to their common Guyhood. They might have come down in the world, but hitherto, whatever might be said of them, they had, at least, never rendered themselves publicly ridiculous. Now they were asked to degrade themselves by accepting the ignominious position of London Statues! Was there a Guy who would ever hold up his head again, after such an infamous surrender of his self-respect and independence? He felt it his duty to denounce ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 103, November 5, 1892 • Various
... If I could, it would only be by refusing to degrade myself further in connection ...
— The Divine Fire • May Sinclair
... is smart, industrious, energetic and persevering in his general makeup, the Negro will soon fall into line; so after all, whatever helps one race in the South will help the other and whatever degrades one race in the South, sooner or later will degrade the other. But you may reply to this assertion by saying that the Negro can go to the city and make an independent living for himself and family, but you forget that all real wealth must come from the soil and that the city cannot prosper unless the country ...
— Twenty-Five Years in the Black Belt • William James Edwards
... to degrade me, to make a coward of me, to force me to put personal interests before my most ...
— An Enemy of the People • Henrik Ibsen
... formulated. The only result of such legal formulas is that they bring law into contempt because they have to be ingeniously and methodically cheated in order to adapt them in any degree to civilised human needs. Thus such laws not only degrade the name of Law, but they degrade the whole community which tolerates them. There is only one ultimate reason for either marriage or divorce, and that is that the two persons concerned consent to the marriage or consent to ...
— Essays in War-Time - Further Studies In The Task Of Social Hygiene • Havelock Ellis
... continue barbarous—Not a tyrant, for terrible as are the evils of irresponsible authority, with whomsoever it may be vested, in her hands it becomes the most tremendous instrument that Providence in its indignation can employ to crush, degrade, and utterly to paralyze the nations within its reach. The former position will readily be conceded; and the history of Rome under the Emperors, or of France during the last century, affords but too striking ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Volume 54, No. 335, September 1843 • Various
... breeding, and which it may be well enough to mention here. I have seen frequent instances where one of the very best jacks in the country had been put to mares of good quality and spirit. Putting them to such contemptible animals seemed to degrade them, to destroy their natural will and temper. The result was a sort of bastard mule, a small-legged, small-footed, cowardly animal, inheriting all the vices of the mule and none of the horse's virtues— the very ...
— The Mule - A Treatise On The Breeding, Training, - And Uses To Which He May Be Put • Harvey Riley
... the meannesses of human respect to degrade his Christian dignity. In whatever company he might be, he always saluted the Blessed Sacrament when passing a Church; and he never met a priest without paying him a mark of respect. A word from his lips sufficed to silence whosoever dared ...
— The Story of a Soul (L'Histoire d'une Ame): The Autobiography of St. Therese of Lisieux • Therese Martin (of Lisieux)
... frenzy of murder? It would have been better to drink that last drop of royal blood, than to mingle it with gall and venom and poison; it would have been better to smother the child, as was done by the emissaries of Richard III. in the Tower of London, than to degrade and sully his intellect by that slow method of assassination which killed the mind before it slew the body. He should have been struck a year or two before; his little feet should have been aided to mount the rude steps of the ...
— Celebrated Claimants from Perkin Warbeck to Arthur Orton • Anonymous
... be too proud to fight." The country gasped for breath when it read those words, which seemed to be the official statement of the President of the United States that foreign nations might out rage, insult, and degrade this nation with impunity, because, as the rabbit retires into its hole, so we would burrow deep into our pride and show neither resentment nor sense of honor. As soon as possible, word came from the White House that, as the President's speech had been written before the sinking ...
— Theodore Roosevelt; An Intimate Biography, • William Roscoe Thayer
... betrayed. A concordat was held. For the honor of your petitioner, we call attention to the fact that his proceedings were remarkable for a purity not found in any of the scandalous failures which daily degrade the commerce of Paris. The creditors of Birotteau received the whole property, down to the smallest articles that the unfortunate man possessed. They received, gentlemen, his clothes, his jewels, things of purely personal use,—and not only ...
— Rise and Fall of Cesar Birotteau • Honore de Balzac
... arithmetical adjustment. This is probably a graver error than apparent formlessness. Design and logic and unity there must surely be; but any obtrusive evidence of mathematical calculation must degrade music to the level ...
— Lessons in Music Form - A Manual of Analysis of All the Structural Factors and - Designs Employed in Musical Composition • Percy Goetschius
... ago that the Congress enact mandatory fixed sentences for persons convicted of Federal crimes involving the sale of hard drugs. Hard drugs, we all know, degrade the spirit as they destroy the ...
— Complete State of the Union Addresses from 1790 to the Present • Various
... more right than anyone else, except in an emergency of danger to himself or others," replied Sergeant Brimmer. "But there's this difference: I've been in the Army fourteen years, and I never knew an officer to degrade himself in that fashion. But occasionally a non-commissioned officer will so disgrace himself. Either the officer or non-commissioned officer who swears at or strikes an enlisted man may be court-martialed, and, if ...
— Uncle Sam's Boys in the Ranks - or, Two Recruits in the United States Army • H. Irving Hancock
... rhyme, who, seated in his corner of selfish complacency, regards the eating of his pie as a virtuous action, enjoys the contemplation of it, and thinks what a pleasant object he thus makes of himself to his parents? Shall I, to take a step farther, degrade the sanctity of the closet, hallowed in the words of Jesus, by shutting its door in the vain fancy of there doing something that God requires of me as a sacred OBSERVANCE? Shall I foolishly imagine that to put in ...
— Thomas Wingfold, Curate • George MacDonald
... to his purpose: he made use of his residence in Prussia and the favor of the king to increase his fortune, and to injure and degrade, as far as possible, all those for whom the king manifested the slightest partiality. He not only added to his riches by the most abject niggardliness in his mode of life, thereby adding his pension to his capital, but by speculation in Saxon bonds, for which, in the ...
— Berlin and Sans-Souci • Louise Muhlbach
... recollections which surrounded one whom custom regarded as little above a mountebank, and the illiberal law as a vagabond. The same degrading appreciation attached both to the actor in plays and to their author. The contemptuous appellation of "play-book," served as readily to degrade the mighty volume which contained Lear and Hamlet, as that of "play-actor," or "player-man," has always served with the illiberal or the fanatical to dishonor the persons of Roscius or of Garrick, of Talma or of Siddons. Nobody, ...
— Biographical Essays • Thomas de Quincey
... among the number, though in her heart she would gladly have been there. She had many times longed to join them, and was even now only kept back by her pride, and the conviction that it would degrade her to place herself in the ranks and acknowledge Minnie Kimberly as her head and leader as the other girls cheerfully did, although Minnie herself had placed Mabel in the position of command, and loyally insisted on her approval being necessary ...
— Hollowmell - or, A Schoolgirl's Mission • E.R. Burden
... mouse that takes up its lodgings in a cat's ear'(2) has a mansion of peace to him: he dreads every hint of an objection, and least of all, can forgive praise mingled with censure: to doubt is to insult; to discriminate is to degrade: he dare hardly look into a criticism unless some one has tasted it for him, to see that there is no offence in it: if he does not draw crowded houses every night, he can neither eat nor sleep; or if all these ...
— Table-Talk - Essays on Men and Manners • William Hazlitt
... except on rare occasions when necessity demands, being wholly given over to the chase, to war, and politics, but they retain the knowledge. Indeed, were a noble to be known not to be able to read and write, the prince would at once degrade him, and the sentence would be upheld by the entire caste. No other but the nobles are permitted to acquire these arts; if any attempt to do so, they are enslaved and punished. But none do attempt; of what avail would it ...
— After London - Wild England • Richard Jefferies
... propriety be said to have reached almost the last stage of national humiliation. There is scarcely anything that can wound the pride or degrade the character of an independent nation which we do not experience. Are there engagements to the performance of which we are held by every tie respectable among men? These are the subjects of constant and unblushing violation. Do we owe debts to foreigners and to our own citizens contracted ...
— The Federalist Papers • Alexander Hamilton, John Jay, and James Madison
... like cowards in this situation," said Frederick. "It would be strange if they didn't. Who will insist that he can stand upright when the ground beneath his feet is giving away? If a man were to say so, either he would be lying, or his lack of feeling would be so great as to degrade ...
— Atlantis • Gerhart Hauptmann
... lamb, or a cross, or some other object of an emblematical character. [319:2] "We must not," said they, "cling to the sensuous but rise to the spiritual. The familiarity of daily sight lowers the dignity of the divine, and to pretend to worship a spiritual essence through earthly matter, is to degrade that essence to the world of sense." [319:3] Even so late as the beginning of the fourth century the practice of displaying paintings in places of worship was prohibited by ecclesiastical authority. A canon which bears upon this subject, and ...
— The Ancient Church - Its History, Doctrine, Worship, and Constitution • W.D. [William Dool] Killen
... your bridesmaid. I could never co-operate in the unhallowed scheme of wedding a man whom you despise. Oh, Olga! do not degrade yourself by ...
— Infelice • Augusta Jane Evans Wilson
... eyes revealed that he would have said more, but the room was meantime filling with players from the stage, some exchanging compliments, some strutting before the glass, and he would not so degrade his dignity before them. Dick, foil in hand even in the manager's room, was testing the steel's strength to his utmost, ...
— Mistress Nell - A Merry Tale of a Merry Time • George C. Hazelton, Jr.
... that? It is not death that matters, but the fear of death. It is not killing and dying that degrade us, but base living, and accepting the wages and profits of degradation. Better ten dead men than one live slave or his master. Men shall yet rise up, father against son and brother against brother, ...
— Man And Superman • George Bernard Shaw
... of admitting them cannot be overrated. Even in the case of the best of these islands, it would demoralize and degrade the national suffrage almost incalculably below the point already reached. To the Senate, unwieldy now, and greatly changed in character from the body contemplated by the Constitution, it would be disastrous. ...
— Problems of Expansion - As Considered In Papers and Addresses • Whitelaw Reid
... troops of the Union; the salons where only the best and brightest had collected have been sullied by a conquering soldiery; and their leader has waged a vulgar warfare on the noble womanhood his currish spirit could not gaze upon without a fruitless effort to degrade. ...
— Four Years in Rebel Capitals - An Inside View of Life in the Southern Confederacy from Birth to Death • T. C. DeLeon
... clothes, houses, and horses, to attend to "politics," while Patrick was only too glad and ready to develop his political abilities. So it came to pass that a ring of powerful political "bosses"—if we may degrade so good and honest a Dutch word—was formed. Saloons, gambling-houses and dance-halls multiplied, while an oligarchy, ever grasping for more power, nullified the laws and trampled the statutes under its feet. The sins of drunkenness and bribery ...
— Charles Carleton Coffin - War Correspondent, Traveller, Author, and Statesman • William Elliot Griffis
... which distinguished that immortal contest—blinding their eyes to the "lines of empire" in the "infant face of that cradled Hercules," and the tremendous sprawlings of his nascent strength—and seeking to degrade those forests into whose depths a path for the sunbeams must be hewn, and where, lightning appears to enter trembling, and to withdraw in haste; forests which must one day drop down a poet, whose genius shall be worthy of their ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 3, August, 1850. • Various
... in question you employ all your malicious spite (and you have great capabilities that way) in trying to degrade the character of the corps de ballet. When you imply that the majority of ballet-girls have villas taken for them in the Regent's Park, I SAY ...
— Roundabout Papers • William Makepeace Thackeray
... the Abbate, the servants, as nothing better than a lustful little whore. As if for practice, he recounted to himself in detail what he had just witnessed, delighting in the invention of incidents which would degrade her yet further. He would say that she had stood naked at the window; that she had permitted the unchaste caresses of her lover while the morning ...
— Casanova's Homecoming • Arthur Schnitzler
... Gessler's paltry Baal is but the empty ducal bonnet of Austria, which he hath exalted on a pole; and he commands the men of Uri to bow down before it, under penalty of death. Wouldst thou wish thy husband to degrade the name of a Swiss, by stooping to ...
— Heroes Every Child Should Know • Hamilton Wright Mabie
... exchange of prisoners." He then turned to go away with the ambassadors, as a stranger might not be present at the deliberations of the Senate. His old friends pressed him to stay and give his opinion as a senator, who had twice been consul; but he refused to degrade that dignity by claiming it, slave as he was. But, at the command of his Carthaginian masters, he remained, ...
— The Ontario Readers - Third Book • Ontario Ministry of Education
... marry a girl whose consent could be given only to save her father's memory from stain, and her mother from a broken heart. And greatest and blackest of all, you would utterly destroy the life and degrade the soul of one whose erring feet we owe it to ourselves to lead back to straight paths. On these charges I have summoned you to this account. Every charge I have evidence to prove beyond any shadow of question. I could call you before ...
— The Price of the Prairie - A Story of Kansas • Margaret Hill McCarter
... ever to insist that the first chapter of Genesis contains the beginning and the end of sound science; and to visit, with such petty thunderbolts as its half-paralysed hands can hurl, those who refuse to degrade Nature to the ...
— Lectures and Essays • T.H. Huxley
... was left them but one thing of which they could be proud—their ancient name. De Lara, who belonged to one of the noblest and most distinguished families of the Iberian Peninsula, would never consent to degrade his line by allying his only daughter to a nobody, however worthy in other respects the ...
— Sir Henry Morgan, Buccaneer - A Romance of the Spanish Main • Cyrus Townsend Brady
... thinking to degrade me, pulled down my canopy of state, and since then my keeper has come to offer to write to their queen, saying this deed was not done by his order, but by the advice of some of the Council. I have shown ...
— CELEBRATED CRIMES, COMPLETE - MARY STUART—1587 • ALEXANDRE DUMAS, PERE
... condition we are in now, and in which without great and immediate effort we are likely to remain, we degrade our patriotism. That we should have to tremble lest we be starved is a miserable, a humiliating thought. To have had so little pride and independence of spirit as to have come to this, to have been such gobblers at wealth—who dare defend it? We have made ...
— Another Sheaf • John Galsworthy
... To degrade man tends to deform him. The suppression of his state was completed by disfigurement. Certain vivisectors of that period succeeded marvellously well in effacing from the human face the divine effigy. Doctor Conquest, member of the Amen Street College, and judicial ...
— The Man Who Laughs • Victor Hugo
... friend, among other grievous misconceptions current among men otherwise well-informed, and which tend to degrade the pretensions of my native land, an impression that there exists no such thing as indigenous modern Irish composition deserving the name of poetry—a belief which has been thoughtlessly sustained and confirmed by the unconscionable literary perverseness of Irishmen themselves, ...
— The Purcell Papers - Volume II. (of III.) • Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu
... thought possible they could be vehicles for conveying to us the deepest practical truth of Christianity,—that the highest life of man only begins when he begins to accept and to bear the Cross; and that the conscious pursuit of happiness as his highest aim tends inevitably to degrade and enslave him. Even those who read novels more thoughtfully, who recognise in them a great moral force acting for good or evil on the age, may be startled to find George Eliot put forward as the representative of this higher-toned fiction, and as entitled to take ...
— The Ethics of George Eliot's Works • John Crombie Brown
... given, first and last, why women should not vote, but I desire to say, in the full light of a ripe experience, that some of them are fallacious. I refer more particularly to the argument that it will degrade women to go to the polls and vote like a little man. While I am not and have never been a howler for female suffrage, I must admit that it is much more of a success than prohibition ...
— Remarks • Bill Nye
... has come to treat his wife with a more considerate kindness. If she is still but the hewer of his wood and the drawer of his water, he has, in many cases, elevated her to the position of dictatress in these humble affairs. He allows her 'help!' But, mentally and socially, he continues to degrade her. In law she is scarcely recognized, except as a criminal. She is punished if she does wrong, but has no legal protection in her rights as an independent human being. She is only man's shadow. The public opinion that affects her is made by ...
— After the Storm • T. S. Arthur
... fall to the ground. Where is the fitness, then, of replying to those who urge upon the House the topics of duty and policy that they attempt to force the treaty down, and to compel this assembly to renounce its discretion, and to degrade itself to the rank of a blind and passive instrument in the hands of the treaty-making power? In case we reject the appropriation, we do not secure any greater liberty of action; we gain no safer shelter ...
— The World's Best Orations, Vol. 1 (of 10) • Various
... introduced luxury, wealth, pride, and avarice, which degrade while they elevate. Successful war created great generals, and founded great families; increased slavery, and promoted inequalities. Meanwhile the great generals struggled for supremacy; civil wars followed in the train of foreign conquests; Marius, Sulla, Pompey, Caesar, ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume III • John Lord
... liked Bombay all the more for this confession, but thought it necessary to extol Baraka for his quickness in finding him out, which drove Bombay nearly wild. He wished me to degrade him, if I thought him dishonest; threw himself on the ground, and kissed my feet. I might thrash him, turn him into a porter, or do anything else that I liked with him, as long as I did not bring a charge of dishonesty ...
— The Discovery of the Source of the Nile • John Hanning Speke
... put up with rough and dirty accommodation, because the better sort of houses were of this class. If there are few sights which shock the traveller, there is much even on the surface to indicate vices which degrade and enslave ...
— Unbeaten Tracks in Japan • Isabella L. Bird
... miscalled festivities. I say miscalled, for, though a loyal subject of her Majesty, and one who hath borne arms at Tilbury Fort in defence of her Majesty, it inflamed my choler, as a plain and blunt man, that her Mightiness should so degrade her dignity. Howbeit, as a man who hath his way to make in the world, I kept mine eyes well upon the anticks of the Great, while my Lord joined the group of maskers and their follies. I recognized her Majesty's presence by her discourse in three languages ...
— New Burlesques • Bret Harte
... we receive from glass painting is one altogether inferior, and in which we should degrade ourselves by over indulgence. Nevertheless, it is possible that we may raise some palaces like Aladdin's with colored glass for jewels, which shall be new in the annals of human splendor, and good in their place; but not ...
— The Stones of Venice, Volume I (of 3) • John Ruskin |
